


Under the sea...

by PastelWonder



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Enthusiastic Consent, F/M, Gingerrose - Freeform, Hux is a sea god and a gentleman, Huxtopus, Interspecies Romance, May/December Romance, Multiple Penetration, Rose is Rose, Sea Monster & The Little Mermaid, Tentacle Sex, Tentacles, They said I couldn't make a sea creature romance DD/lg, mermaid rose, they were wrong, with a tragic past
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-11
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:21:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 17,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25844959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PastelWonder/pseuds/PastelWonder
Summary: Rose remembers the day the orcas attacked her pod.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Rose Tico
Comments: 49
Kudos: 122





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tmwillson3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tmwillson3/gifts).



> Back up on my bullshit.
> 
> A huge thank you to GillyBean for the gorgeous art:
>
>> [View post on imgur.com](https://imgur.com/xtIpnRI)  
> 
> 
> Inspired by Ms. tmwilson3's delightfully filthy, feelgood work, [I've Been Waiting](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24322513/chapters/58638721). 

Rose remembers the day the orcas attacked her pod.

She was still a little calf, small even for the number of days and moons she’d seen, so she swam close to Mama. Sister was bigger; Rose remembers how she looked undulating ahead of her in the water. So much longer, so much stronger than baby Rose. Her tail a more subtle, suitable blue-grey.

Rose was very conscious of her strange tail.

It was shaped like Mama and Sister’s – long and sleek and tapered. With beautiful double-fins and a long, lacey spine. Like the thin coral sheaves which wavered soft and translucent along the reefs in the shallow waters. And like many of those corals, Rose’s tail was a lurid, vivid red.

Her father, the alpha of their pod, had not wanted her because of her tail. _It is a lure,_ he told Mama. _It will attract death._

But Mama would not leave Rose to be picked apart by the leopard seals and moray eels which hunted the pod’s nursery near the shore. And Alpha could not bear to leave Mama behind.

Even now, Rose believes what brought the orca on their pod was her red-lure tail.

She is sure Alpha would say the same, if he had survived.

The attack was quick and brilliant. The pod was crossing deep blue waters, Rose’s first time in The Cold. Her tail and the tails of the other calves were only just strong enough to make the swim from the nursery to Fish Cove, where her pod hunted the shallows beneath the gold-glinting reflection of Great Sun.

Sister had told Rose all about Fish Cove, a mythical-sounding place where flocks of delicious fish swam so plentifully they seemed to jump into the pod’s open mouths. She promised to teach Rose hunting, and deep-swimming, how to dig for luscious crabs and shrimps and the many names for the shells and creatures they would see in those bright-teaming shallows. Sister was much older than Rose and coming into her season. This would be her last long travel before she took a lover from their pod and had a calf of her own, and she wanted to practice her mothering.

Though it has been a thousand days and moons since Rose touched the skin of her sister, she loves her still.

And wonders if she survived.

The orcas came from beneath them. Deep-colored like The Cold, they were camouflaged the way Rose’s tail was not. She remembers hearing their song for the first time, so mournful and beautiful. She thought they were another pod.

But Alpha knew too late they were not.

In her nightmares, Rose feels the change of pressure in the water against her body and in her ears. The vibrations as an orca twenty times the size of Alpha surged straight up from the depths of the dark, endless waters and battered him up, up through the surface. Spat him up into the air a league above her and caught his falling, arcing body in its maw.

By then, there were more of them among the pod.

Mama frenzied. She snatched Rose’s wrist and swam so fast the blue-grey waters mixing dark with blood trail blurred. They seemed to swim forever. Mama’s tail pumping, undulating so strong and so fast.

Now, when Rose can bear to retrace it, she sees they did not get far at all.

An orca seized Mama’s side from her right.

 _“Swim, love, swim!”_ Mama’s clicks and squeals were frantic. Rose does not let herself remember the painful, wrenched angle of Mama’s body or the blood pluming up from the orca’s bite. Only Mama’s voice, which even in her terror was caressing, like it was when she sang Rose lullabies. And her eyes.

Like Sister’s and like Rose’s. Rose remembers her mother’s eyes.

_“Swim, love, swim!”_

She did swim, with all her baby might, thrashing her inexperienced tail against the thick, frigid waters of The Cold. Away from Great Sun’s piercing shafts of gold light. Away from the massacre of her pod.

_Deep._

Rose had never swum so deep in all her life. She is a sunlight creature – her kind play and make love and raise their calves in the shallow warm. They bask naked chested and bare breasted beneath the bright leer of Great Sun.

The Cold is a dark, empty wasteworld filled with hate secrets and monotone waters. Its depths seem to go one forever, and Rose’s first breach is terrifying. Like swimming into death’s blue maw. Her young tail is not yet strong enough to cut quickly through the still, heavy ocean, and she struggles.

It feels like moons and days before she reaches the wreck.

A huge, looming graveyard of landman steel and beauty-less, monotonous growth, it is barely visible to Rose. A moray eel almost her size lunges from a port window as she approaches. She dodges screaming, choking on coldness and anguish and terror. Her small body convulses with rapid, uncontrollable shakes.

Too fearful to venture inside the wreckage, she huddles close to the blithe body of the sea-claimed ship and watches prayerfully the waters above.

In The Cold, everything is silent.

All her small life, Rose has been ensconced in the clicking laughter and chatter of her pod.

 _Red algae._ That was the pink haze canopy over the cradle in the nursery where she and the other calves this season were born. Thin, curling tendrils of red-glowing algae making a beautiful, translucent nebula over her crib.

That is what the blood of her Alpha and mother look like on the surface of The Cold. Soft, plumed helixes of red algae.

Whatever is left of her pod does not look for her. They do not ever come back to the waters near the landman’s wreck.

Alone for the first time in her very small life, Rose huddles sidebody of the wrecked ship. Eventually, Great Sun abandons her too. The already-terrifying waters grow heavier with dark. She feels the vibrations of night-predators looming through the waters.

But Rose does not care if she is eaten this moon.

She mourns.

Rose adapts.

Her tail is her liability and her salvation. A beacon to predators, it is also a lure for the toneless, silver-bodied fish which swarm her growth-covered wreck. Though she is barely weaned, and any fish she has ever eaten was caught and fed by hand to her from Mama, Rose learns to hunt.

She exists off these silver fish for a while. Their bones are sharp and resistant to crushing and they are tasteless. But they are also plentiful, she is grateful for that.

Eventually, she grows brave enough to venture inside the ship.

It is a dark, terrifying place filled with things the landman uses to make war. Strange objects she knows must be useful but cannot decide how. She does invent uses for some of these objects – the small, sharp, sleek-looking ones most particularly. They become her tools for catching fish, and for her protection. Her kind do not rely on weapons, but it is crucial she carry them if she means to survive in The Cold.

And she does.

There are dangers, too, inside the wreckage. Solitary sharks patrolling their territories. The ones too small to conquer Rose ignore her, but sometimes there are greater sharks, with maws so big they could tear her to pieces, like an orca. Their bellies are as cloud-white.

She hides herself from those great whites.

The eels, too, are temperamental. Shy at first, but then lunging baring fangs if they sense she is a competition for food. A very large moray snaps his jaws at the trailing fin of Rose’s red tail and tears her.

Blood plumes.

It attracts many sharks.

Rose cowers in a room of Landman’s Wreck until the bleeding stems. It feels as if it takes forever.

A day and moon pass.

When she emerges, starving and shivering from the cold and from fear, she kills that eel.

For several days and moons, she wears its spiked spine like a mantle around her neck. To remind her that she must be more careful. She is alone now, and she must survive until her pod comes back.

She must grow stronger. She must grow sharp.

But she is still a very little mermaid. Hardly weaned. She misses Mama’s voice, her sky-white hair floating softly and shining all around her as she swims smiling above Rose like a star. She misses Alpha’s strength and Sister’s laughter.

Each night, Rose cries herself to sleep.

She tries living in Landman’s Wreck in The Cold. But she is a shallow water creature. Her skin so lovingly tanned by Great Sun shining through her nursery waters turns pale and she begins to feel sick. The fish she eats are too bland and sharp-boned to live off of. The eels taste bitter. She digs and digs but finds no prawns. No clams.

And the loneliness… the still, empty silence of The Cold is… _death,_ to a social pack creature such as Rose

She must leave and seek warm bays.

But she does not know which way to swim.

Each day, she ventures a little further from wreckage, terrified each time she does that she will be ambushed by the great white-bellied sharks or by the orcas. The waters of The Cold are so dark-blue-deep they are almost opaque. She swims out and stops and turns around and around many times. Watching. Listening. Her hair falling floating around her small calf-body. Sensing…

nothing.

She senses nothing but the deep, sterile dark.

 _“Mama!”_ she bleats one day as the Great Sun’s light is fading. So far away from Landman’s Wreck in her search that she can no longer see its looming shape. Though she gorges greedily on the silver-sharp fish, she feels she is starving. Nothing good in this place has touched her since the day the orcas attacked. She has felt no warmth of another body pressed close to hers. She has heard no one laugh. There is sickness inside her. It grows each day and moon she is alone.

 _“Mama! Mama, where are you! Sister! Mama-”_ she sobs as she click-squeals for Sister, for Mama, for Alpha _._ Straining to hear their answer and fear-knowing she never will.

It is because of this desperation that, when she sees the looming shadow of the great shark swimming towards her, she believes it is Mama.

_“Mama-”_

Too late, she recognizes the spiked sail and dangerous sweeping curve of its maw.

It is a great white.

And it is not alone.

Something else is swimming up fast behind it. Something _even greater._

 _I will be eaten,_ Rose thinks, bracing herself for the eventuality. _I will be eaten like I eat a fish and I will die-_

She is too far from Landman’s Wreck to swim back in time, and in her heart she is too tired. She squeezes her eyes and tries to imagine what the teeth of the shark and his whale-brother will feel like going into her body. The way they went into Mama’s.

Her heart pounds.

Then there is the most terrible sound.

A torrent rushes. It rips over her, and she thinks, _This is the shark._ But there is no puncture, no savage rip-thrash-tear. More torrents rush and she is thrown in them.

What could be so powerful that the deepest, stagnant waters of The Cold are stirred?

She does not want to see Death. Even as the dark waters stop their churring and lull still, she does not open her eyes. She holds herself against the fear of what is coming for her and cries.

_… why do you weep, child?_

There-

above her-

is the voice of the Great Sun.

Masculine. Entrancing.

She looks, and sees water is full of blood.

_Not mine._

It is everywhere. All around her, in great, dissipating columns. They wind and they feather, spreading a red haze which blurs slowly back to deep blue. Above her, floating a league away near the ceiling of the ocean, is the shark.

He is torn in two full halves down the length of his body. As if something caught him by the open maw and ripped him cleanly apart.

But what in this world is strong enough to do that.

The answer is undulating inside the red, hazy light.

He is beautiful. Spreading himself wide and cycling slowly like a kaleidoscope star. Contracting towards his dark center like the petals of an anemone, and unfurling again. _Dancing._

For her.

His body is a red, pulsating sun.

_Beauty._

He grows larger and larger as he drifts slowly down towards her through the water. His descent gentle and purposeful. Controlled.

He does not wish to startle.

 _What are you,_ she wonders, watching with equal parts amazement and fear. Perhaps what she is seeing is the open, soft-fleshed mouth of a leviathan come to swallow her. Sister used to warn her of the leviathans, who snatched up and gulped down naughty merbabes who snuck away from their cribs.

But as the mass drifts closer, Rose sees it is not a mouth, but a titanic, undulating cap. Like a jellystar. Its points are many, many thick, powerful tentacles. They coil slowly, coordinated. To show her their sleek, muscular flex.

_Dangerous._

_But not to you, little one…_

He has reached parody with her, and she can see now, above his webbed mantle, blending into it, is a waist with skin as red as the scales on her tails paling upwards to pure, perfect smooth white. _A man_. He is Alpha-bodied. Five times _larger_ than Rose’s sire, at least, who was the largest man in Rose’s pod. The stranger’s mass _dominates_ the dark waters of The Cold.

The shark’s blood is just a thin veil around them. The slow, sensual movement of this stranger’s tentacles makes the water around her vibrate and churn softly, like a caress. His limbs unfurl further and float around her. She is suspended among them.

They drift unhurriedly towards her.

His eyes are not like a merman’s. They are rounded, nearly colorless and full of shine. Adapted to see by the moonlight. His hair is no color she’s ever seen before. _Volcanic_. A shade so close to her treacherous little tail. His white face is angular, not soft and sun-shaped like Alpha’s. For some reason, its lines remind her of harsh things in Landman’s Wreck.

This man is made for war.

He is… he steals her breath away.

She has been alone now almost one moon cycle, with no one to speak to but the eels and the fish. Even if he is Death, she craves his nearness.

She wants to touch…

As if he can read her desire inside the wavers of the water around her, his tentacles close in on her. _Soft._

_And slow._

The first brush of their firm, smooth cups is _electrifying._ She exhales through her gills, shudders and goes perfectly still. Then his touch is everywhere, all over her tender body. Sampling gently every inch of her at the same time.

 _Stunning,_ she hears his voice in her mind.

His tentacles caress her. Down the spin of her tail to its trailing, translucent fin. Along delicate scales at her small, wasted torso. Circling the tender meat of her upper arms. They sift through her hair even, lifting it high so that his pale eyes can watch it float falling around them, signaling beautiful tingling sensations across her scalp.

A curl in the indelible muscle at her lower back coaxes her forward, so that his hands like hers can strum along her gaunt ribs above the solid, soft-smothering slither of his tendril around her waist.

Unabashedly, he explores her flat, naked breasts with his fingertips. He tilts her chin and examines her throat. Slips his thumb into her shocked, parted lips and parts her wider. Peers curiously at her teeth before stroking sensuously at her tongue.

Her heart skips- it thrashes strangling like a shark in a net at her ribs. She is nervous, overwhelmed by the completeness of his touch. Her blood is pulsating-

and so is his color. His mantle and its arms are changing, flashing brilliant. Like lightning striking the ceiling of the ocean. Blueblackyellowredwhite-

in tune with the beat of her heart.

She is mesmerized. Lulled deeper into gentle paralysis as he continues to explore her with his fingers and with his tentacle touch.

Her hands float helpless at her sides. _Is he going eat me?_

As if he hears her thought, his long, sensual lips quirk. _You are too little, I think, for that…_

How does he speak without clicking?

 _“Are you the Great Sun?”_ she asks, those clacking, squealing tones sounding foreign to her after drifting so long in the silent wreck. Her heart pounds in her throat like the lash of a great tail.

The curled tip of one tendril tips her chin further back. His eyes are on her neck as casually he projects, _Oh no. I am something much more dangerous than that._

He kisses her there, on her pleading pulse-point. A soft-lipped caress that brings more tears to her eyes.

Her head lolls back against the waiting upward curve of a tentacle. He cradles her as slowly, tenderly, he draws his mark upon her flesh.

She does not yet understand how many more marks he intends to make on her body. Or the ecstasy they will bring…

 _“Please, don’t hurt me,”_ she clicks in a whisper. Lashes drifting shut.

 _No, cherished,_ his voice is so deep, like the ocean shaking underground. It rumbles in her mind. _Never that…_

_Then what does he want with me?_

She feels an answer tremor through his body coiled completely around hers. A chuckle. _One thing at a time, shall we, my flower? Sweet little mermaid. You must eat. And rest._

_Rest._

That sounds so lovely.

 _“But it’s getting so dark,”_ her eyes peel open. She peers through the loops of his tentacles which have ensconced her now. Through their cracks lined with thick, flexing cups, she sees the ocean ceiling shadowed by failing light.

She cannot swim when it is moon. Her eyes will not work.

Another chuckle. The waters churr around them- distantly, she hears a great, rushing sound as she is propelled forward inside the catch of his many arms. Streaking fast as a falling star.

_So it’s him that can move the water like that._

She lets her eyes drift shut and sinks deeper into sweet surrender. Carried away from Landman’s Wreck and the ruined hope her pod will come back for her. To whatever place he wants.

She feels no fear of him.

Only the bone-deep pleasure of true sleep.

His den is like nowhere else in the world.

In vague ways it reminds Rose of her nursery – of the cradle in which she was born. Set back deep inside the warm, hollow grottos of her kind’s mating cove. Dark, mysterious and fertile. Teaming with soft-voiced, milking mothers and their precious newborn calves.

There is the same sense of safety and of ease and of mystery inside the hot, bright cloister of his cave.

This creature who calls himself in her thoughts, _Armitage…_

She still has not heard him speak. She thinks… maybe his tongue is broken and cannot make sound.

He finds other ways to communicate to her with his mouth.

There is great pleasure in his kisses. At the end of his lair where he keeps her hidden away like a landman treasure, spread out on a lush bedcrop of soft anemone and lace coral fronds. The chamber is long and narrow, spanning almost forever just before it ends in a cul-de-sac. There, the ceiling is much higher. _Brighter._ Encrusted with a thousand sparkling speleothems which give off sapphire light. Like the crowded, blue-glowing teeth of a shark. The walls of the enclave are backlit and glassine, rough-planed and multifaceted. Glowing with some sort of strange, sulphuric warmth. Inside the cave is balmy, stifling almost. _Sensual_. It comforts Rose.

Especially when he is there. Swallowing up the space with his enormous, powerful body. Thick, sleek tentacles touching her everywhere…

From the beginning, he is opaque about his intent.

 _You are too young to bear,_ he observes mildly through her mind, without a sense of frustration. Rose remembers her Alpha-father, and the other mermen of her pod, as impatient, barking, brute-sort of men.

Armitage is not such a one.

The first few days and moons, he feeds her constantly by hand. Like a mother.

She cannot help but imprint.

 _My poor flower,_ his tentacles stroke her softly, observing with his eyes and his touch her poking ribs, her gaunt collarbones. He tut-tuts. _Eating mackerel all by herself in the darkness. When you require so much more_ variety _than that. Don’t you, little mermaid? Here, try a prawn- Oh yes, that is much better, isn’t it? Yes. Have another, my sweet. Don’t be shy-_

She devours greedily all the delicious things he brings her. Clams and oysters lurking oily inside their beautiful shells. Scallops and small pinchered things. Lobsters and crabs. Kelp, too – young, tender stalks of it. Their salty-sweet knobs burst freshly inside her mouth. Fishes of every shape and size and color. He brings them live to her, caught in the coils of his tentacles, and those she does not eat she keeps for her amusement.

His tendrils fondle her lovingly as she chews, measuring the progress of her waist, or else teasing so pleasing the sensitive vellum veil of her fins. Stroking through her hair.

 _So unique,_ he praises, soaking up every detail of her features as if that is his nourishment. _Truly exquisite. But how has one so lovely come to be all alone in the Atlantic, I wonder?_

 _He has such strange way of speaking,_ she thinks.

That makes him laugh.

 _“We were going to Fish Cove,”_ she tells him through the luscious _crunch_ of a prawn. _“For the feeding season. To get fat-”_

He nods, stretched out long alongside her on their soft bed of anemone, dark tentacles spread out into the narrow corridor beyond their bedroom and coiling up along the walls. His arm makes a triangle beside her, temple propped on his fist. Big, white hand stroking ticklingly up and down her belly. One corner of his long, sensuous mouth curled in pleasure at the sound of her voice.

 _Naturally,_ he assents.

The prawn shell, well pulverized by her vicious little teeth, suddenly tastes dry in her mouth. _“We were attacked- from underneath-”_

She shows him with the mimicking arch of her hand.

_“-by orcas. They were big-big. They tore my Alpha apart…”_

Her lips tremble. She does not think she can speak of Mama, of her beautiful full body punctured by the whale’s teeth, of the red brumes of blood wafting up from her flesh into the water and staining her white-golden hair as red as his. But she does imagine it, she can’t help not to-

The soft-coiling end of a tentacle cups her cheek.

He tilts her. Kisses her tenderly on her brow. _I too watched my mother die. Little one, I am so sorry-_

She throws her arms around his neck and grieves for them both.

 _“It was m-my fault,”_ she squeaks as her sobs start to settle. She glares hatefully through the many loops and rungs of his tentacles now bound tightly around her at her gemstone tail. Red as rubies in a landman treasure box.

The reason Mama and Sister died.

 _No, my heart,_ he soothes her. His body is all around hers- it seems to be the way his species communicates comfort. _Want._ By swallowing their other whole in a powerful embrace.

She wishes she had more arms with which to hold him back.

 _It was your Alpha’s,_ his voice in her mind is tender, but there is a hard hate-edge to it. _Poor leadership. That is how your mother died._

Again, his tentacle beneath her chin tilts her. Its tapered end winds slowly, sensually, like the dance of a serpent along the ocean floor, around her short, slender neck. Collaring her without harming. His cups suction sensually. She knows they will leave a faint, lovely pattern of marks.

_His._

He is so fiercely possessive, this creature who says he is more dangerous than the Great Sun.

She wants him to keep her. _Desperately._ To moor her to him, like a barnacle to a wreck.

_Inseparable…._

He smiles down at her. Face so close to her own now she can see her little calf reflection in the glow of his strange-shining eyes.

 _Let it be so, then,_ he says in her mind.

He kisses her.

It is delicate and chaste.

She clings onto him too tight. Digging at his back with her fingers. Greedy.

Never, she’ll never let go.

He holds her in his tendrils as she sleeps.

Moons pass before she will willingly ventures from his shelter. There is a part of her which is afraid if she leaves it, she will not able to come back.

He coaxes her out into the open with trinkets and oddities. Eerie landman contraptions which make her itch to discover more.

 _Come and see, little mermaid,_ he beguiles. Tentacles trailing like fish lures, leading her cautious venture to the mouth of his cave. _What delights I have in store…_

He stokes her curiosity effortlessly.

The waters outside the lair are nothing like The Colds. They are bluer, more brilliant. Dazzling in the beaming shafts of the Great Sun.

The cave itself is set into a landmass, _covered_ in every kind of color and beauty she could ever believe existed in the world.

Sheaf upon sheaf of pink and blue coral. Bright-swarming shoals of striped and patterned fish. More schools with silver-flashing bodies as small as her littlest finger dart in and out in synchronized chaos among the beautiful stalagmite webs and long-furling anemones and wavering sea reeds. Making dazzling, clever patterns to avoid the turtles hunting the reef in languid laps. Spotted eels and sea snakes wend industriously about their business, finding meals and mates and hiding from the rays. There are snails and shells of every color and barnacles as bright as her red tail.

She spies a creature a bit like her lover but smaller- much, _much_ smaller. It is bulbous, with those long-tentacle arms and legs she now so adores.

 _“Look!”_ she squeals, looking back at Armitage over her shoulder.

 _Go on,_ he encourages.

She beams before she darts.

The game they make is brilliant. She harasses whatever animal interests her, and Armitage chases behind. Letting her corral and corner her intended subject to the point of almost-snatching, then ensnaring her himself. Winding her up in his long tendrils around her tummy and tale and dragging her backwards and up, into his arms. He pins her delicately against his mammoth body and kisses her with her head tipped back. More ardent and lavish each time.

She does not know yet, but it is the mating dance of his kind.

 _The rock is volcanic,_ he explains with his telepathy when finally, she is exhausted from their play. Much, much sooner than he is.

In fact, he seems energized.

He ghosts up behind her where she is drifting, examining all the beauty before her with a sense of wonder and peace. Tentacles churring the water so much more silently that the vivid, sensual _swish-swish_ of her idling tale. These waters outside the cave are colder, and she feels alive and vivd, thrumming from their game.

Her body is especially sensitive as his glides possessively around skin and scale. Cherishing.

 _But do not fear,_ his mind croons to hers. _This volcano has been dormant for many years, and many more to come…_

 _What strange, ridiculous things this man says_.

That thought of hers makes him snort.

Her jet hair floats all around them as she rests. Mama’s mane was as long as her grown body, Rose remembers, and dappled with the adornments of her kind. Pearls and barrettes of blue coral and seashells. Rose’s own hair is meager, thick but only waist-length. Yet it seems to please Armitage immensely – a tendril or two lift it continuously so that his eyes can watch it fall slowly back to her breasts.

His own hair, while very bright and glinting, is foreboding. Stiff, like a turtle’s hard shell. Hardly any fun at all to play with. Always slicked back meanly to his skull.

She tips the crown of her head back against his chest and peers upside-down at him as her hands stretch up. She feels so refreshed from her days of rest and lush feedings and their play among the reef. Her sadnesses are far away, and she feels for the first time in many moons the longing to play.

She is _determined_ to displace even a strand of his hair. Though she is very small, compared to him, not one-tenth the length of his body, and that is a keen disadvantage. She must stretch so very long to brush her fingertips at even his jaw.

His pale eyes gleam down at her. He is well aware of her intent as he chides her, _Mischievous little eeling are we, today?_

She chuffs, churning bubbles from her gills.

 _There is something I wish to show you,_ his huge, hard hands fondle her little body. Coiled tentacles brushing teasingly along her tail.

Though she is at least two years from her first season, his touches make her feel…

_Beautiful._

_Relaxed…_

Her eyes hood as his thumb strums softly at her nipples, broad enough to please both with a single, tender pass.

They drift that way for a while. Gently. His many arms wrapped jealously around her body, the curled tip of one thick, muscular tentacle stroking over and over above a singular, throbbing point near her waist in her tail. She notice that the end of this tendril is not like the others. It is filigreed, complicated with lacy, trailing coils of firm, dark flesh and flanged.

 _Strange._ She had not noticed this before.

Her arms stretched up the length of his chest hold onto him with fingers netted together behind his neck. Eyes looking into one another’s.

 _“I love you,”_ she says. Thinking of how handsome he looked surrounded by the translucent brumes of shark’s blood at Landman’s Wreck.

Mythical.

 _Do you have any idea,_ she hears his voice mangled with some emotion inside her heart, _how long I have searched… for you. How humbled I am, by your beauty. Rose. My sweet, tender flower..._

His coils tighten around her body, and it almost hurts, and she wishes he would hold her tight. That he could _absorb_ her, carry her inside of him.

Forever.

 _Soon,_ his husk in her mind is a whisper. One of his sleek, powerful tendrils is around her neck. Posing her throat-extended. Another, the strange-looking one, strokes deeper at that patch of slick scales just above… just above…

_You shall carry me inside of you…_

She snorts dreamily inside the magic of his blue, blue eyes. _“You’re too big to go inside me.”_

His broad smile reveals those startling, glinting-sharp rows of razor fangs. _How sweet you are, my child. Now-_

His limbs unwind around her slowly, stealing his beautiful pressure back.

She grieves the loss.

_Come. Allow me to delight you in other ways._

She follows him unquestioningly through the waters away from their lair, small body undulating along the sandy floors beneath his shadow. Hyper-attuned to the truth that, even as he leads a bit ahead of her, he wants very much to watch her swim.

She excites him – how, she’s nor sure, exactly – but that she does excites her back. He must be very powerful, to control such a beautiful, plentiful place without the safety of a pod.

She undulates her body, swimming as prettily as she can – as prettily as Mama – and follows the lead of his shadow ghosting along the floor.

Rose grows strong beneath his tender watch.

She is a quick and agile hunter. Small calves rely on the success of the pod and on the meager scraps spared by their Alpha until they are large enough to dig at the ocean floor for crabs. They grow slowly.

It is not the case for Rose.

By the time the moon has spun herself in a dance across the arcing night but six times, Rose is twice the size she was the day the orca’s attacked. Longer, and much, much fuller. Her skin shines like polished coral. Her arms are strength encased in a healthy sheen of fat. Her breasts too, are nicely budded, making her waist a beautiful shape between them and the fuller flare of her scaled hips. Her tail is even more vivid, a brighter, more lurid red. Just like her lover’s hair.

There is a softness to her belly from good feeding, and a gentle roll even behind her back.

These changes please Armitage immensely. He strokes obsessively the small, ticklish dimples which have appeared above the hindswell of her tail.

 _Stunning,_ she hears his praises deep inside her as she lies beneath him inside their lair, tentacles coiling up the walls around her and stroking her, and revels in his touch.

There are other changes, too.

She has amassed quite the collection of oddities. Some ornamental, some mechanical.

She is learning the ways and inventions of the landman.

This pleases Armitage, too.

 _My flower is very clever,_ he observes as she shows off to him her latest invention – a lure which turns and attracts fish with its strange, melodious sound.

It is a box of sorts. She spied it among the wreckage of a ship much smaller and more luxurious than the one in which she sheltered when she lived in The Cold.

 _That was a warship,_ Armitage told her. How he knows so many things about the ocean and the landman, Rose is not sure.

He says he is very, very old.

She has rigged the box, fiddled with its hinge and added a spring coil, so that when the dancing landpeople in the center are disturbed by a curious fish-

_Snap._

The box will shut. Trapping her meal inside.

 _Excellent,_ is his judgement of her demonstration.

Smugly, she preens.

 _“When do we take our big swim?”_ she asks him as they comb through another ship. They are further from their lair today than they have ever been, and he has promised her _adventure._ A moon away from home, inside the deeper, bluer ocean. There are fish and eels in a deep crevice, he tells her, which flash their lights against the dark. Like living, swimming stars, it is how they hunt through the darkness.

And how they signal their desire to mate.

Rose thinks of Sister, so excited to go into her season. Of beautiful, sensual Mama who reveled in the many, many calves she had born for the Alpha of their pod.

Rose wishes her hair was longer and adorned like Sister and Mama’s. She would spin slowly, let it make a gossamer veil around her. She would blink all her lights at Armitage.

 _I am not a pod-animal,_ he explains gently, with a tremor of caution – or maybe it is reservation, Rose cannot tell – as they make their way from the ship they have ravaged towards this secret crevice of lights. Armitage leading above where the waters are more difficult for their many vibrations, like a dark tentacled sun. Rose swimming in his shadow along the calmer, stiller ocean floor. _I do not travel from feeding ground to feeding ground with my herd._

 _“But then-”_ she swishes over onto her back and swims parallel to him along the sea floor belly-up. A gesture he says he finds cute. _“-how can you see your family?”_

_You are my family, Rose._

His answer makes the insides of her belly soft and warm.

 _My species is asocial,_ his blue eyes are watching her – _always –_ as he explains these things in his calm, clear voice. His face is haloed by the shimmering pale waters above him.

He is stunning, to her.

 _“Aye-soshell?”_ What an unusual word.

 _Meaning we are,_ he searches for a sentiment she understands, _unkind._

Oh.

Instantly, she objects, _“But you are kind to me.”_

 _I desire you,_ is his uncomplicated reply.

Looking up at his massive unfurling figure, his lean musculature which can tear a great white in half, she flushes with pride. _I lured this Alpha…_

She hears his smile inside her mind. _Certainly, you did._

 _“But don’t you miss your sisters?”_ Rose cannot help but think of hers.

Every day, since she was alone at Landman’s Wreck.

 _I have no sisters. My species is only male._ Her lover’s eyes gleam inside the shadows of his face turned down at hers. _And were I to meet one of my few remaining brothers somewhere inside the vastness of the ocean – we two would fight until the death._

He adds darkly, _And I would win._

This startles her. She stops swimming and gapes at him.

His shadow sweeps over her, moving more quickly than its mellow drift a moment before, and then disappears. For a beat of her heart the setting lights of Great Sun are too bright for her, but then her lover reappears. Much, much closer this time.

He takes her in his many arms.

She may be bigger, stronger than she was the day he saved her, but she is still a tender thing. Gentle-hearted. Like her sister. Like Mama.

Mermaids are not violent creatures.

What is this man she loves?

 _“But how can you hurt each other?”_ she whimpers, letting him draw her close in his sheltering embrace.

Chest-to-chest, they sway above the ocean floor.

_“You’re family.”_

_Sweet flower,_ his tendrils stroke her. Cup her chin and lift her face. Wind softly, sensually around her waist. Her neck. _There is so much in this vast world you do not yet understand. I cannot take you to Fish Cove to discover what is left of your clan. My kind are not welcome among the merfolk-_

 _“Why not?”_ she wants to know.

No answer comes back.

Her lover stays silent, watching her intently.

 _He does not want to tell me, because it is a bad reason,_ she thinks, _but he will not lie._

 _Yes,_ echoes in her mind.

So many questions whirl inside her. How many of these killer-brothers are out lurking in dark water? Has he killed one before? Are they as strong as him – can he fight all of them? How can they only be boys? And if they are only boys, what was his mother? How could she have had so many great and terrible, beautiful, destructive sons?

 _Do not ask me these questions,_ his lips are on her forehead. His voice in her head feels…

sad.

_I have only sad answers to give you. And I do not wish to see you cry._

Her heart aches. For him, and for his brothers lurking in the ocean who want to kill him. For his mother, for having such sons. For her own Mama – _what would she think of my lover? –_ and for Sister. The grief is strangling. Unbearable-

She lurches up and kisses him.

His tendrils around her young body tighten with passion. Her arms around his neck squeeze back.

She loves his mouth until the ache in her heart subsides.

 _He will take me to Fish Cove to look for Sister,_ Rose hides this decision inside the deepest part of her, away from his all-seeing mind. Like a fish in her lure box, she will keep it a secret from him. Until his desire for her is greater than his more brilliant words and the clever, wending way he uses them on her. Until it hurts him so much to tell her _no_ that he will not dare to.

That day is coming, the moon whispers inside her heart. In some secret, feminine place which is budding like an anemone and will bloom. The day is coming when this creature who thinks he is the most dangerous in the sea will bow to her. He will court her, dance for her, _beg her,_ for something-

And she will make him promise before she gives it to him.

She must be clever.

There is a gentle humor, a tender admiration for her in his eyes when they part.

 _What a beautiful snare you set out, little mermaid,_ he tells her, as one of his tentacles lifts slowly a swath of her hair. The corner his mouth curled upwards.

She pretends she does not understand what he means.

 _“Armitage,”_ her lashes flicker softly. Her body thrums, warm from his kisses and his looks and his touch. “ _Will you show me the dancing lights, now, please? Please?”_

His smile broadens. Showing her those incredible, dangerous teeth she often forgets he has.

_Of course._

The lights steal her breath away.

They are far, far from their lair when the display begins. Armitage tells her they will bed down together when she ready in the semi-open sea, among a formation of rocks half a league from the crevice. She is frightened to be away from his den which has become so safe and familiar. But her lover assures her, they are still well inside the boundary of his territory. Though she does not know what that could mean, she trusts his words.

If he says she is well-guarded, she is.

The lights are magnificent. Singular at first, and very faint. She leans as deep as she dares over the crevice as it starts, insisting with shrill clicks and squealing that he hold onto her with all eight tentacles and both strong arms.

Her vision is very bad at moon-time, and she is terrified of the darkness.

And of jelly stings. And orcas. And sharks…

But then the lights begin to flick on more and more, one after another. Blinking ones, then the streak-flashes like lightning on the ceiling of their ocean of the electric eels. The throbbing, pulsating bodies of jellies mingling at a safe distance away from them inside shoals of a thousand blinking pinprick plankton and winking shrimps.

The water comes _alive_ with light.

She sees everything. All of the terrible, beautiful wonders which lurk in the deep. She clicks and chirps and weeps joyfully.

How is it one lover can show her so many good things?

The show lasts a very long time. It is still going as her lids start to grow heavy with each blink and her lashes begin to droop.

Sleepily, she yawns.

Her lover bears her silently to the outcrop of rock where they will shelter for the rest of the moon. His body makes a tender cradle for her amongst the jagged edges. She wants to live like this always.

In his arms.

 _“Our calves will be warriors,”_ she tells him sleepily. Fingertips of her small hand tracing his cheek. _“Like their Alpha…”_

The coiled tips of his tentacles stroke very softly at the scales near her holes. The front slit under her soft navel which always seems to fascinates him. And the other, in the hindswell of her tail from which occasionally she eliminates.

He can be a very strange creature, her lover.

But she always welcomes his touch.

 _And clever too,_ his voice in her heart is ever-alert, yet peaceful. He is docile in this moment, lulled and lulling her to dreams. _Our sons will be clever. Like their mother…_

Rose drifts smiling into sleep.


	2. Chapter 2

Their courtship begins with a gift.

It is many more moon-cycles since she and her lover slept with bodies bathed in the blinking, winking lights of the canyon before her desire begins to stir. By the time she awakens to him, she is strength and power sheathed in a warm, healthy coat of fat. Her tail grows twice the length of her upper body. The veined veils of her fins are generous and broad. Agile and ornamental. Their filigreed ends beckon softly even when the waters are still. Her breasts are full and lush. Tipped with soft, swollen areoles the most delicate shade of coral blush. Each one dotted with a pearl nipple. They crinkle beautifully, sensually when they are touched.

And her lover touches them often.

Her body blooms like night algae on the ocean’s face under the moonlight of his love.

Her arms, deft and capable and ringed nicely in softness, he wraps in loop after loop of his tendrils. The dimples above her hindswell are always sweetly bruised from the soft suckling of his mouth. His fingers explore every inch of her. Fondling each and every scale as she lies beneath him in their bed of anemones. She surrounds them in crowning jewel of her beauty. Her endless, ink-black veil of soft-flowing hair.

She _pants_ , aching, as he loves her…

His love is so complete.

Their lair swells with her cries and soft whimpers and with the iridescent bubbles which trail from her gills. The bubbles shine in the lights of their enclave like a landman’s mirror. She begs him, wriggling inside his merciless grasp, _“More… please… yes… forever…”_

There is magic in his touch. Inside the firm, sensual tips of his tentacles tapping softly at her openings. Her smooth front slit, her hindhole. Her soft-trembling mouth. Inside his lips and tongue at her breasts and at her shoulders. Her sweetly sensitive neck. He gives her deep, smothering pleasure.

He _is_ more dangerous than the Great Sun.

She experiences many good tremors when she is beneath and surrounded by him. His touch is expert, relentless, and she is eager. Even if she is young. She shakes until she is juddering inside the clutch of his tentacles. His sleek, suctioning, undulating strength is…

_ecstasy._

He taught her the meaning of that word, the first time he described her taste.

_Yet._

She senses, as she lies trembling and gasping inside the many delirious, prismatic pleasure hazes he surrounds her with-

There is more he has to give.

She is very greedy for his love.

The _more-ness_ has something to do with his tendril end which is different from the others. That one which is flanged and trails many beautiful helix coils of firm, flaring flesh. It is the tip which most often paces the parted seam of her lips as he pleasures her. Or else slides slick and insistent in the valley of her breasts. _Back and forth… back and forth…_ Hard and heavy.

Her touch on this tendril feels different to him.

When her small pink tongue explores it shyly, her lover _groans._ Bares his big, mean fangs at her and _hisses._ Piles it deep inside of her mouth, until its trailing ends touches pleasurably the back of her throat. He _growls. Snarls._ He is unlike anything in the ocean she has heard before.

These are the first sounds she hears from him outside of his voice in her mind, and she is _very_ pleased they are for her.

She wants that tentacle and all its brothers so deep inside her. _Throbbing._ Filling her. Forcing her to stretch _._ To take more…

 _But where,_ is the question. They cannot all fit into her mouth, and she is anxious to try each one. Most especially, the unique one.

 _He is anxious too,_ she thinks dreamily, floatingly. Watching him pant and snarl above her one moon as they give love to each other. Every tentacle but one wrapped around her tightly and pinning her to the bed. Her arms are drawn out comfortably at her sides. His titan hands which can make even the lush fullness of her breasts seem inconsequential grope and press them tightly. His strange-ended tendril which she craves saws furiously between the soft, slick cleft made by her breasts. Its dark tip emerges and disappears again and again from the tight seam of her tan globes.

His round eyes flash at her. His tongue which is so long and beautiful lolls between his dangerous fangs and laps her face. 

She wills him with calf-mewls and soft flickers of her lashes to come closer. To kiss her…

His sudden burst of passion clouds their lair in a white, soft-glowing haze.

This thick, luminous love should be inside her too, she thinks jealously.

But how?

Her lover will not tell her.

 _You are a determined little flower_ , he explains. _Endlessly persistent_. She would be keen to mate, and she is not yet ripe. They must wait for her season.

 _To take you before you are ready would be… devastating,_ he tells her again one moon as they lie coiled around each other on the mound above their lair. Bodies hidden. Woven together among the gently wavering columns of sea reeds and soft-frond coral like two moray eels in love.

The moon above is complete. Her pregnant light bathes the waters in calm, pearl-colored light.

They make love to each other’s mouths with lips and tongues and speak only between kisses. Rose with tender clicks and whimpers. Armitage with murmuring whispers inside her mind. They speak of many things. Their conversation meanders pleasantly, as they often do.

She has asked him the question of mating many, many times. Each time, she pleads for a different answer.

Yet it is always the same.

 _I would tear you,_ his words are very simple. But the image, coupled with the powerful feel of his tentacles wrapped tightly all around, is enough to chill a little of her eager heat.

Where each of his long tendrils is thickest, he is twice the circumference of her waist.

For he is still nearly ten times her size.

 _And that, in turn, would tear me. Have patience, my love, have patience._ The pale crook of his thick, gentle fingers turns her small face towards his.

But she will not meet his eyes.

She is a mermaid, and they are lush, demanding, uninhibited creatures. _Gluttonous_. She wants to gorge herself on his love.

Now.

 _My poor, deprived little mermaid,_ he teases, nuzzling tenderly with his nose at the round swell of her cheek. Slowly… oh so slowly… he drags his long tongue over her sensitive gills above his tentacle coddling her neck.

She whimpers. Her body pulses for him.

 _You know you are well-loved,_ his voice whispers in her mind. His closed, interlocking teeth press gleaming to her ear.

She feels his breath.

After a sensuous shiver, she huffs. Still glaring petulantly away from him through the corners of her eye beneath her long-curling lashes.

His dark chuckle vibrates every limb and shakes her world.

_My my my. What a fickle little star…_

Her teeth not as long and deadly as his chew inside her lip. Her lover is sensible, but he is also passionate. Possessive. He wants more and more of her with each passing wheel of the moon, and his reasonableness cannot hide it.

If she goads him…

Making her face softer and more pleading, she trails fragile fingertips along his sleek-bulging muscles. Over the hard ridge of his bicep. Down his taut, pale-flexing collarbone. Her fingers dance shyly on thick plate of his chest above his heart. Her eyes she makes gentle and more luminous and slides them to his watching her intently.

She flickers her lashes.

In her sweetest, most calvish click, she whimpers, “But I want to feel your calves inside me so badly. _Armitage._ I dream about them… Their little bodies so strong and beautiful, like their Alpha’s. Moving in me. Oh, Armitage. I want to hold all your sons to my heart…”

He _growls._

She has no fear. Not even when her body is pinned mercilessly to the reed and coral-covered rock by his coils. Not even as they tighten and wring her, their thousand suckers puckering sensually at her sensitive scales and skin.

Her lover mounts her. Beautiful face framed by soft-wavering flora and bathed in shadow. The moon’s bright, diffused light behind striking his hair and making it burn.

Her belly answers with fire. _For him…_

She shuts her eyes and lets her arms drift above her head along the rock. Waiting for and then rewarded by the slow-answering wind of his tentacle binding her all the way to her hands. Even the tip of him wends between her fingers, stretching their gaps in a mimic of something sensual and dark she does not understand.

He is beautiful, threatening pressure. His limb around her neck uses its crooked tip to tilt her chin until the extension is a glorious ache.

She gloats.

 _Petulant girl,_ his voice in her mind is strained, and outwardly he is _hissing._ His loops around her slither in concentric bands, torturing her with his suctioning touch. Drawing her blood to the surface. Making her insides ache and churn.

When he does release her, she will be covered in his marks.

 _I want to be…_ the prayer drifts away from her, gently up towards the swollen moon.

 _You will,_ her lover says in her mind. Rattling like a great leviathan, he takes one of her breasts bulging between his coils almost wholly into his mouth.

The draw on her soft, pebbled nipple is _electrifying._

She struggles in pleasure and finds she cannot move at all. Just the vellum trail of her tail thrashes excitedly. She cannot writhe.

Not even as the very tip of his fourth finger breaches her front slit.

The sudden pressure is… _overwhelming_. Confusing.

Not…

His finger is blunt-edged. Smooth yet hard-jointed. Many, many times the size of her own. Never has she been touched there. Ever. _Inside_ her scales. She whimpers as his knuckle sinks through her sensitive rim, stretching the tender scales apart.

He goes d _eeper._ Forever and ever. Sinking into a part of her where she is neither smooth-skinned nor scaled. Where she is raw and hot and the flesh touches itself.

_Delicate._

Slowly, he peels her apart.

It _aches._ She makes a sound she’s never heard from herself before as softly, _so softly_ , he begins to stroke...

Her whine is guttural. She pants, eyes rolling beneath quivering lids as if she dreams. She feels frightened and she feels wild. She is not at all sure she likes the way he is filing her _there,_ but maybe _…_

Maybe…

_“Ahh…”_

_Now imagine,_ his voice gravels darkly inside her. The coiled tip of his tentacle wrapped sensuously around her neck unfurls and laps across her face. It is the flanged, filigreed limb.

For the first time she can remember, Rose notices its _girth._ Two times that of his finger stroking inside her. It thickens quickly to the width of her wrist and then widens ever more.

_-were I to take you the way you tempt me…_

His words kaleidoscope with the moon and her stars as Rose makes the connections he desires her to. Her heart _pounds,_ like tempest waves beating relentlessly on the roof of the ocean. But many, many times faster than those.

It does not begin to settle until slowly, tenderly, he withdraws.

Finger and tentacles retreat.

Her body thrums with the gentle release of pressure. She trembles, in awe and in fear and in _wonder_. How _can_ they ever mate? It would be impossible. She would die-

 _Shh-shh-shh,_ his lips press against her cheek. His tendrils along with his two arms gather her close to his heart.

She clings.

Gently, the sea revolves. Like a landman’s wheel, it’s turning. When it settles, she is above her lover. Sheltered in the hollow he makes for her in his mass.

He cradles her.

Her hair floats around and above them like a shadow. Dyed silver by the light of the moon.

She fears she will disappoint him. She huddles with her fists beneath her chin and wonders if he will cast her away.

His limbs hold her close. _You, Rose, are my heart. My every aching desire-_

His voice is like a thick kelp bed drawn softly across her mind. It quiets her as his strong hands and sleek, suckered tendrils stroke her body.

Eventually, her tremors subside.

 _There is not a facet of you which does not delight me,_ with soft-coiling tentacles, he coaxes her arms around his neck.

She clutches, hiding her face in his gills.

His admonishment comes as lightly as the glow of the furthest star. _But our love is not a thing to be trifled with. Our timing must be immaculate. There is a way in which these things are composed. It is a dance, little mermaid-_

His tendril crooks and lifts her cheek for her to see his eyes are soft.

But she is too ashamed to meet them.

Until tentacle ends and fingertips conspire against her with delicate tickles. At her belly. Along her scales. His chest rumbles with a great, gentle _purr_ for her _._

The first from him she has ever heard.

She does not know it yet, but it is the same sound her sons will make as they feed from her breasts.

Her lover is watching her with round, pale eyes shining with love.

 _Let us wait for our song to begin, shall we? Hm?_ his coil thrums her cheek. _There are those brothers of mine who take that which is not willing given or prepared. The consequences are-_ his gaze stutters behind his half-masted lashes, _unimaginable…_

 _Grief,_ she thinks. Another first she has seen from her stoic lover. _He grieves._

 _Infinitely,_ his lips press a kiss to her forehead. He lingers there. _Before I found you. I was grief and I was rage. Now-_ One of his mammoth hands splays across her belly. As fattened as she is by her good feedings, he still eclipses her with his span.

His voice inside her heart is thick with emotion as he whispers, _I defy to hope._

 _“I’m so sorry,”_ she whimpers, eyes wet beneath her lash. Both for tempting him, and for everything he has lost.

 _Do not be,_ he soothes, ever-patient. _Your ardor flatters me, my love._

She does not have the many fine and unusual words to tell him, _You are my love, too. My perfect Sun. My heart beats for you-_

She takes his large face between her hands and nuzzles him everywhere with the tip of her nose instead.

 _I never expected to find one so lovely,_ his voice in her mind is an almost-whisper. _But let us wait. Hm? Just a little while longer?_

His tentacle tickles her chin.

She does not think she can. She does not _want to._

But for him, she will try.

Blessedly, their song begins just a few days later.

Though at first, she does not understand.

She has trained him to allow her to hunt by herself. Her lover is a very cautious creature – that is how he has survived so many moons and suns – and he is attentive to her besides. _Very._ She lavishes in his affection.

Most of the time.

Others, she desires to be alone. To think. To speak out loud in little murmurs to herself. To make up her own little games and fables and to chase the fish and the eels. To tinker without the interruption of a curious, winding tentacle around her workings. To lie quietly in the lushness of the soft-wavering reeds above their lair and let her own tiny, delicate fingers explore her body. To cherish sometimes that vulnerable feeling of when she is not encased in the many-slithering loops of his love.

He was resistant at first to even very short partings. He does not understand why she cannot do her solitary things from his lap.

She has had to wean him slowly. And even then, in the beginning, she could feel at a distance his pale eyes like the color of blue water struck by white light following her every undulation from ridge or crevice. It is a heady thing, to hold the obsession of such a fearsome being between her tiny needle teeth.

It is also irksome at times.

But by now he is used to being separated nearly a day at a time. After they have shared a waking meal together, and he has cloistered her against the floor of their lair and given her love. Traded long kisses as his tentacles surround and stroke her. He kisses her as if he may never kiss her again. Then comes the recitation of his rules as they leave together through the mouth of their lair.

_Stay within the borders. Call out this way if you see a shark. Like this if it is a whale. Be mindful of the landman’s treasures, they can be deadly or otherwise sharp. Always use caution…_

And so on.

His territory is vast, she realized quickly, and it is a feat for him to patrol. The days he does not take her with him, he is gone nearly the full arc of Great Sun.

It is in these times she does as she likes.

The day her season begins, she is stalking crabs.

They are a wonderful challenge. More than once, one has pinchered her finger or bitten the trailing film of her tail with its claw. She collects them live in a kelp-weave basket she fashioned herself with very little help from Armitage. She likes the way they jumble and clamber in the thatched lid sack on her back. Snapping their little craws and glaring beadily.

It must be the way she looks to Armitage when she is cross with him. Small and viciously indignant. Biting words and snapping jaws. Not exactly lethal-

but not quite tame, either.

This day as she hunts, she thinks about Armitage.

It is not so unusual. He is the whole of her pod, and she is a pod-creature. His happiness, his health, his moods and attitudes are often on her mind. Sometimes, when she is working or tending the anemones inside their lair, the image of him and the memory of the way he loves her overwhelms. She will lie down somewhere soft and secret and touch herself. Glide her fingertips around her nipples and suckle them in her mouth. Strum her belly as he does. Run her hands through her hair and along her scalp. Thinking of the time he breached her little body with his finger. The taste of his tongue in her mouth.

But today as she thinks of Armitage, his huge body boring through the waters as he protects their home, she feels…

different. Anxious. _Eager._ It has only been one-quarter of the arc of Great Sun since he left to do his patrols. Yet… she feels it has been days and moons. Never has she sought him during one of her sweet alone times.

This day, she does.

He is waiting for her within the deepest waters of his territory. Where the floor is far from the ceiling, and Great Sun’s light strikes in gold, granular slants and the waters are very still. Near the boundary of his territory which leads to darker, deeper waters.

To The Cold.

He is surrounded by a red algae haze.

 _Not algae,_ she should know better by now.

The torn, defeated pieces of would-be enemies hang suspended around him. Leaching slow-winding torrents of blood.

_Orcas._

He has killed two large males from a pod.

They often breach his territory on their path to their hunting and mating grounds. Before her, he tells her he used to let them pass. They are no threat to something his size, and once he found their mournful music beautiful.

But now-

 _Rose._ He is panting. Muscles inside his arms and chest bulging. His tendons strain and flex and he looks _massive_. His strange eyes are wild from frenzy. He is showing his beautiful teeth.

Her heart beats savagely. She feels incandescent. She feels _alive._ Her blood sings inside of her, whirling thrillingly. Higher and higher. Making her… want to _dance…_ for him…

She does.

It is a feral, sensual display.

Hips wending slowly at first, in circular patterns. Arms reaching shyly up, up above. She cycles them. Fingers forming strange, taut-tremoring shapes she knows instinctively to make but does not understand. Her breasts sway, bobbing to tantalize him. Her hair surrounds her, a black and star-studded afterimage struck by the lightning beams of Great Sun. Her fire-bright tail undulates, moving like a serpent’s. Scales capturing glimmering the light and his eye. She is the brilliant streak of a falling star. She is sensuous. _Lewd._

Her face tips up at the ceiling of their world.

Her tail stirs the waters she saturates with her scent.

It dribbles from her tiny front slit. She feels hot and slick inside herself for the very first time. Her breasts tingle. Their areoles tighten and her sensitive pink nipples distend. Anticipating achingly the pleasure of his touch and of his tongue. Her soft belly undulates in waves, massaging her womb and sending more warm, sweet secretions into the water.

_Churning._

She revolves like the dancing landgirl in her lure box. _Reaching_. Letting hands fall slowly back to her body through her veil of hair. Fingers curled or splayed beautifully. _Touching herself_. Preening. Erotic. _Fertile._ She spreads her scent knowing it mingles with the blood of the orcas her lover has just killed.

_For her._

Males of her kind play-wrestle one another to show off their prowess. Her lover could rip the strongest of them in half.

The thought makes her laughs.

 _“Come here,”_ she lures him. With her voice and with her smile and with her laughing and with her dance. Her heart drums as his shape emerges looming through the blood-shadows. _“Come here, Armitage… come play with my body. I want to feel your fingers and your tentacles inside me. Come and love me. Fill me with your sons…”_

His tentacles encroach slowly around her. Reaching with all eight points. The naked hunger in his eyes makes her belly tighten and pulse.

When he is close, she darts.

She is a quick swimmer. She knows the sandbars and the reef they lead to like the back of her heart. She puts everything into her racing. Her heart pounds, like meteors streaking burning from the skies into the ocean its beats crash against her breast.

She wants him to overpower her.

She wants it more than she wants her own life.

The waters behind her are churring. Their black gravity drags down her sprint.

_You will have to do better than that, little mermaid._

His taunt thrills her belly and whorls her mind.

She pushes, undulating fast along her entire sleek length. Up ahead is the landman’s wreck with its delicate treasures and beyond that, the reef.

She is almost to the ship’s keel when the first tendril snares her tail.

His wrench is not gentle. She shrieks, feeling the waters around her _rush_ as he drags her with his tight grasp above her fins. She struggles. Her gills flare, sending up schoals of beautiful silver bubbles. His arms serpent around her body. Her heart is in his titan hand as he gropes her breasts.

He is everywhere around her. Hard and unyielding. _Absolute._

She melts…

 _Would you like try again?_ his tendril beneath her chin coils and cups her jaw. He lifts her, throat extending.

Her front slit thrums and he _growls._ Through his razor teeth, into her ear, down her spine.

She whimpers. She should be struggling, playing along with his lovegame. Instead she is clutching his huge hands in hers, barely spanning three fingers at his knuckles, and wriggling her hindswell against him. Egging him on.

She is so hot, so slick inside.

 _“You are beauty,”_ she clicks, whispering. With her head tipped back in fullness against his chest, she opens her eyes. His face and the points of his tentacles menacing above her. Her lover is light and darkness mantled in _fire._ Wreathed in the watery golden rays of the sun.

He smiles, showing her fully those gorgeous, vicious, interlocking spikes. _No, my little mermaid. You are-_

His hands on her breasts grope her firmly. His crooked tentacles stroke her curves, the spine of her tail.

She shivers. More hot slip leaches from her front slit into the waters he churns with his tendrils.

 _Do you have any idea… how sweet you taste?_ Slowly, he unwinds.

His suckered limbs leave a thrumming, burring ache behind. His marks are dark, the color of blood coral when it blooms, but fainter. Her breasts ache. She tries burrowing back into him but a thick, curved limb gently nudges her forward.

She turns, prepared to beg.

But he is smiling. With glinting fangs and blue-white eyes. Looming over and around her, he is almost the size of the landman’s ship.

 _Indulge me,_ he coaxes her mind, _in one more race. Won’t you, my love?_

Rose pants. Head tipped back, trying and failing to take in all of him.

 _A metaphor, I can assure you,_ his dark rumble tickles her mind.

Her belly aches. She has to force her fins to swoosh. Her tail to undulate. To turn herself and point away from him towards-

_Home._

The mating of her kind is such a gentle, playful act. Done belly-to-belly. Laughing. With many happy chatters and swishing tails and bright, ecstatic chirps. Her instincts tell her to draw close to him, to not exhaust her lover with play. To be good. To be bright. To be still…

She lashes forward, thrashing powerfully through the water towards their lair. She can see it, the rise of its vibrant mound a shadow looming ahead of her.

But she cannot feel him give chase. The waters do not pull and they do not churn.

Her heart beating like the rudder of a great ship sinks inside her. Maybe she has not pleased him. Maybe she has swum _too_ fast. Her body burns from exertion. She has nearly reached the mound. Through the blueness of the water, its colors are manifesting. The reds first, and then the yellows, and then the green of the reeds. She can see the shoals of fish flashing like the bubbles which flock from her gills. The shapes of lumbering turtles and the dark, vulgar slither of serpents and eels.

Has she lost him? Perhaps… should she go back?

A tidal, spired shape rises over their mound.

It startles her so badly, she screams.

Through the torrent of bubbles from her gills which surround her, she sees the black shape of his many-speared reach _coming for her_ over the rise. He is in shadow, but his eyes glower and his teeth menace brightly. She locks in sexual, reverent, adoring terror and squeals more.

Two of his tentacles take her –wrists two together and tail – as the rest of him pours over the hill of their lair like black tide. She thrashes meekly, heart singing strangling pounding inside. This is it, he will take her. _Now._ And the sheer size of him, _mammoth_ , his teeth and his power and his might-

 _Overwhelms her._ Reality meets her with the ferocious kiss of Great Sun.

She is _blinded_ with fierce desire.

He drags her into their lair.

She squeals, clicks and struggles. Encouraging him to submerge her in the dark loops of his power.

He does.

His hold is fearsome. _Unyielding_. He drags her into their low-glowing enclave. Immediately his hands are on her breasts. _Squeezing_. He laves her. Suckles sharply with his lips until her head tips back from sensation. She cries out. One of his tendrils gathers her hair floating like a secret veil around them. He winds and pulls.

She arcs deeply, exposing through even her generous flesh the shape of her ribcage.

Another limb laps its tip across her face.

It is the flanged one. Its lacy edges have grown impossibly stiffer. The filigree, she understands now, are actually barbs. Like the hooks the landmen use for fishing, but much, much duller. They are _rigid._

She trembles.

Until his voice winds itself down her spine.

 _They will give you endless pleasure._ His thick, textured tongue laps insistently at the little hollow in her curved belly. Where, as a calf inside her mother, they breathed as one. _You will only ever know pleasure from me, little one. So much pleasure…_

He is truth, she decides, when her frontslit feels the first deep slide of his tongue.

He curls against her walls.

The aching split-shudder- _slickness_ is nothing like when he penetrated her before. It is beautiful, liquid. Stretching. She whimpers, mews out like a calf. His fingers make firm indents in the soft flesh of her breasts. His tendril with the flanged tip slithers across her shoulders. It winds loosely around her neck. Its edgeless barbs stroke tantalizingly over her face mimic the lap of his tongue inside.

He feasts on her. She is a delicate, luscious prawn in his mouth.

She shivers. Her arms bound up by his tentacles and drawn over her head are bowed. The muscles ache pleasantly. There is a deep stretch in her body everywhere he touches her.

If only she knew what is to come…

The upward saw of his long, crooked tongue inside her finds the rhythm of her pulse. She _thrums,_ vibrating for him. The pitch of her mewls and whimpers climb higher and high. His suckers undulate as they stroke her. They draw taut, silky skin up into their centers and suckle sensuously before they release. Her heart pounds everywhere under her skin and along her scales. All over her young body.

At her hindswell, the tip of a tendril strokes coaxingly along her second slit.

_But why?_

Her eyes widen to the size of moons as in the next trilling beat, she feels an insistent _tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-wriggle-wriggle-breach…_

Her scales split obligingly apart.

Just this little penetration, coupled with his persistent tongue bullying her over some sensual ledge she cannot see, has her wriggling and mewling in his black hold. The more she struggles, the tighter he winds her. Her heart thrills knowing that – even if she wanted to – she can never get away. Her lover may use her any way he please.

She wants him to… she wants…

Her lashes flicker. She tries to see the stalactite ceiling of blue-glimmering teeth. But her eyes will not stay open. They keep rolling back and back…

Her body tightens. She clenches and shudders as he laps her to orgasm inside his tentacles.

She keens.

She feels his dark smirk against her scales. His smooth-barbed end slips into her mouth.

The fullness aches as her throat expands. She is still able to draw in breath through her gills past the thick, loose wind of his limb around her neck. His end at her hindslit whorls deeper- deeper- working in its first sucker. Then a second. Then third. Drawing aching, alien pleasure at the tender walls of flesh. His tendril in her mouth rasps softly its barbs along her throat. Her lips stretch. His suckers on her tongue are so textured. They drag her with them, forward and back as he plunges and retreats so deep she thinks she can feel him in her chest.

Her orgasm dulls the sense of panic she feels at being invaded in so many places at once.

She is bright-sparkling, trembling and fearful. Wanting more and more and more of this strange, unexpected love. Her lover whispers tender encouragements to her with his telepathy. _Yes, yes… that’s it. Relax, little one. Let go. Let me open all your sweet little holes…_

Through his teeth, he is hissing. The rumbling of his purrs from his chest vibrate the warm-stirring water within their lair.

She feels empty without his tongue.

_Never fear, my flower…_

His barbed tip withdraws lushly from her throat. It trails slaver across her tongue and out of her mouth. It strings silver between her stretch, abused lips and his suction cups.

She sighs deeply at a welcome relief in her poor gills.

Her scalp tingles beautifully. Behind her, another tentacle has released her hair.

Her hair rises and floats like a cloud around them. Her lover takes her hips in his hands. Their lair tips and whirls slowly. He rearranges them. Her face points down at the bed of anemone. He mounts and surrounds her from behind.

His tendril in her ass whorls deeper. She stretches to take another of his suckers inside her hot, resistant clutch. His tentacles sprawling around her make their cave even dimmer. She whimpers, anxious to see him, to hold him. But he pins her easily to the soft-tickling bed of anemone and folds her arms behind her back. It is not uncomfortable – the opposite – but she is small, and nervous. She trusts him. But all of this is so new…

His chest smooths down against her back. His tentacle with the barbed flanged strokes at her frontslit. The scales there are soft, swollen and spread apart from his laving. Sensitive….

She shudders with each stroke.

 _Hush,_ his hand like a mountain moves her hair back where it drifts above her cheek. He kisses her the corner of her lips. _It will hurt less if I take you this way, the first time…_

His bright eyes are on her hindswell. His hands on her hips press her into an arch. With her hands bound behind her back, she is helpless. He may position her however he wants.

 _It is so that you do not thrash,_ his limbs not stroking her frontslit or fucking shallowly in her ass or binding her arms pet tenderly her trembling body. One end coils and cups her face turned on its side in the anemones. _If we are not careful, you may hurt yourself on my love…_

His smooth-barbed tip tickles her opening. Despite her nervousness, she whimpers and makes herself go very still.

 _Yes, Rose, that’s it,_ his mind whispers as he breaches her. Surrounding and stroking her so that every inch of her is touched with love. _Oh sweet one…_

He is too big.

Her hindslit clinches around where she is already stuffed.

But his mating tendril is persistent. It whorls gently, piercing the too tiny gap in her scales and then retreating. Stroking her until she is shivering again with pleasure instead of fear. The strange, pleasurable suction at the walls of her ass is a good distraction. His digit undulates there, flexible enough to stoke her without forcing her to take more than she can. She pants, losing herself in the sensual dance of his mating tentacle. Slowly, patiently, it batters her sex. His tendrils with their thick suckers draw sensually on her breasts. Suckling tight, tingling sensation through her nipples.

Deeper and deeper, his barbs breach.

She shakes moaning in his arms with her eyes clinched shut.

He vibrates her body and his limbs with his purrs.

 _Drilling._ His flanged head finally enters her fully in one smooth _thrust_.

Her eyes widen and widen further. She expects him to retreat again but he does not. The pleasure, the outward press of her tender, aching little flesh channel is… unbearable. He glides deeper and deeper, whirling himself. Challenging her to take more and more of his thick, slithering length. She lets out a startled, panicked whimper and wriggles. He tightens his loops and _snarls_ in her ear.

 _Ah ah ah,_ the juxtaposition of his sweet chide in her mind is everything. Everything… _Be still, Rose. Take my love._

She pants through flaring gills.

When he is deep, so deep inside her clenching, gulping slickness she is afraid his tip will come out through her mouth, his nodes and barbs starts a slow, backwards drag.

Sparks scatter inside her like the reflection on water of falling stars.

She keens.

But before it withdraw from her completely, his tentacle resurges. While the tendril in her ass shoves deeper at the same time. _Five six seven eight nine suckers…_ she loses count of the flared knobs which pile inside her from both directions. They rasps and suction at her walls.

She loses times.

 _The slide._ The slide is elegant, twisting. _Dominating._ He overwhelms her little holes with his reach and size. Her scales strain helplessly at her openings. She moans, making the beautiful, mournful song of the deep blue whales. Suddenly her lover is inside her so deeply… _so deep…_ Stroking hot and possessive. _Filling her._ Pushing her aching little walls so far apart she is afraid she will split-

 _You will not,_ even his voice in her mind sounds rasping. His snarling has melted into tantric growls. The rumble the lair and shake her heart.

 _A part of him wants to tear me,_ she realizes with a volcanic surge of passion. _His monster wants to rip me open like a shark, like an orca who has trespassed on his home. But that is just the sliver…_ her eyes in her head roll back as he strokes her faster- faster- spurred on by her thoughts he can read, _every other part of him wants to keep me… to love…_

 _Yessss,_ his hiss reverberates in her mind, _Yes, you are mine. You are mine and I shall keep you, always. As you keep me, my love…_

She chirps, high and sweet, as his tendril in her ass drills deeper. His barbed tip piled deep in her frontslit finds and laps sensually at the end of her channel. At some slick, perforated barrier which his seed will enter.

She clenches. It feels… it feels so good…

 _Sweet little womb,_ his tentacles unfold her arms from behind her. Suddenly, she is in his dark embrace. Back-to-chest. In his arms. _This is what you were made for-_

The nodes on his tentacles suckle her swollen, puckered nipples. The soft skin of her belly. His fingers stroke the engorged, sensitive scales which bulge around his limb when he penetrates her. _Not for them. For **me** …_

She looks down, past the sensual wind of his dark tentacles around each of her breasts. Below his strong forearms flexing boldly around her waist. Past her navel dappled in patterns of love marks. To her tail, where she is split. His tentacle twists as he pistons her forcefully. Showing flashes of sleek flesh and engorged nodes smeared in her thick, silvery slick. She pants, feeling faint and hypnotized. Like the dazzling lights of the canyon, his fast, forceful rhythm entrances her. Behind her, his tendril is relentless at her hindslit. Burying more and more of itself inside her. Stretching her wider and wider until her cries are keening, feminine and shrill.

She tremors as something primal and tidal swells within her.

Vicious yet adoringly, one of his tentacles snares her beneath her chin. He forces her head to tip back.

The blue-glimmering spikes above him mimic his beautiful fangs.

 _This is what you were made for, Rose. To take me, to be filled by me-_ Suctioning tentacles strum her belly. Deep, deep beneath them, she can feel him thrusting inside. Over and over and over. Each barb and node on his member stroking something sensitive.

She pleads and bucks-

 _I will give it you,_ he assures her, his dark tone finally matching the smile of his fangs and the rumble in his chest, _I will fill you until you do not remember what it is to be empty. This is your place, little mermaid. Where you belong. Beneath me, full of me. Filled in every one of your little holes-_

Her mouth, open to mewl at him, _I love it,_ is stuffed with another serpentine tentacle before she can. Her eyes watch his, wide and willing, as his limb reaches deep and bulges her throat.

 _Above me, in your beauty. Beside me, as my mate,_ his tentacles accordion her much smaller, much weaker body. They jostle her between their relentless push-pull. She stays limp, still, and revels in the sensations. Comets colliding and exploding with great bursts of light. She judders, gulping at his nodes massage her throat.

 _Faster, faster,_ He fucks her.

 _Such a long, sweet season my little mermaid has,_ his hands cover and manipulate her breasts above the rope of his tentacles.

She comes whining around his limb in her mouth. Eyes rolling back. _Convulsing_. Her belly tightens. It _aches_ where he is inside her front and back. But he does not stop. Barbs and cups drag fiery trails of pleasure along her abused, clenching channels.

She whimpers, struggles. Knowing and loving that he will not stop until he has taken what he wants.

 _Not taken, my flower,_ his tendrils catch her arms and spread them outwards. Like the wings of a manatee. Looping over and over, until they swallow her wrists and hold her taut. Their tips thrust rhythmically through the spaces between her fingers. _Given._

Down, down below, he strokes her tail.

 _Your season will last almost a moon-cycle,_ his murmur is gentle, academic. But his snarl is a beast’s as he watches her pleasure peak. She dashes in the hot, roiling waves of his mean-thrusting members. One into the next, they break her. Make her whole. _Imagine, how much I will revel in you **,** my sweet-_

Her heart quakes upwards in her breast, reaching for him. Hot sensation overwhelms her as lava rushes violently across the ocean floor. She erupts with more and more and more slickness. More shudders. More keening wails around the tendril down her throat.

 _Every day and every moon which passes I will fill you – take you - until you are as limp as a little sponge,_ his big hands splay like stingrays across her belly. Pressing deep to make her feel more acutely his hard, textured, aching thrusts. _You will reward me for my patience, won’t you, my Rose?_

 _Yes,_ she wants to nods. She wants to whimper. But she’s so full… so full…

 _Yes, you will,_ his arms are cradling, cherishing. Out of tone with the rest of his limbs using her so hard.

A tickle at her hindslit rouses her from her pleasure haze. Where his tentacle is already pistoning brutally inside her, its brother is worming to come in.

Her eyes widen. She struggles, suddenly very, very alert.

But the tips of his tendril pleasure her swollen scales front and back. His mating member thrusting unendingly inside her poor, abused little frontslit draws more and more sparks where she clenches him with her sore, needy flesh. His fingers strum softly at the spot on her belly where eventually he will fill her with his children-

All of it lulls her to accept him. To accept being used and filled for his pleasure.

Her beautiful, beautiful Armitage.

Her hindslit yields when she relaxes. The first tentacle withdraws to make room for its brother and they fight for space in her ass. Hard, asynchronous thrusts which blur her vision. She stares blankly up at her lover. Peaceful. Blissful. Letting the ache meld into something more beautiful than anything she has ever felt before.

_Surrender._

_My perfect mate,_ their small, tight lair is filled with the smell of her. Joined, aching bodies and the peaceful sound of her calvish whimpers and his deep purrs. She is floating among lights on a liquid surface of pleasure. Mama is with her. She knows Sister is alright, and that Rose will find her soon.

 _If that is your wish,_ she hears her lover’s whisper in her mind.

How can a monster be so tender and so giving and so good to her? So harsh with her body in a way she loves- _loves._ How can solace come from something more dangerous than the Great Sun…

 _I love you,_ is his answer. Vulnerable. Tremulous. Like that day they swam to the crevice to see the winking lights. When he was afraid to tell her the truth she understands now through osmosis. Her kind do not accept his because these sea gods steal their women to breed. Armitage fears if her people see her they will try to take her away from him. That she will want to go, to be with her kind. He will be left behind to die of aching loneliness.

Like her pod left her in The Cold.

 _Silly monster,_ she thinks, as love tears slip through her lashes and mix with all the beauty around them in the lair. _Silly Armitage. You. Belong to me._

He holds her fiercely. In her mind’s eye, she sees landmen’s ships tossed in tempests swallowed suddenly by these limbs. Whole ships overwhelmed and _smashed,_ landmen spilled into the waters to drown.

She awes.

Yet she feels no fear.

The thrusting of all four limbs becomes violent. Fast-fissuring and beautifully intense. Lights and color strait across her closed eyes. She knows later Armitage will make love to her so gently it will bring tears to her eyes. That he will lie with her on their bed of anemone and let her explore him. He will show her all the many stunning and tender and glorious ways her body can take his love. He will breed her for the whole of her season and give pleasure to her beyond.

For now though, _this_ is her desire. To feel her sea god’s power as he claims her for good. To kiss on the lips a danger greater than Great Sun.

His mating tentacle inside her bulges. The _stretch_ is a good, good hurt. It bulges and bulges and swells and swells until it locks and cannot stroke out. Against it, she feels the fight of the two limbs inside her hindslit. His tendril in her throat withdraws in a magnificent arc. It leaves her raw, aching. Gasping through her gills before her neck is tightly wound.

He kisses her. _Deeply._ Mercilessly.

Like a lash of lightning through the ocean, his limbs holding hers out to her sides drag hers in and wrap around her waist. All eight of his tentacles gather her inside a beautiful black clutch as he burrows his maw deep against her nape and _comes._

He bites.

She is shocked, and she is not.

What is even more distracting – more _thrilling_ , more beautiful – is the way he fills her when he comes. Hot, roping jets of something so thick she can perceive it _exactly_. More and more and more and more. _Burning_. Achingly sweet. It swells her, at first just her insides. Then finally, she feels her belly bulge against his limbs holding her close. She is heavy, sloshing with hot seed as he snarls and jets and _bucks_.

She would think it is silly, the sounds he makes. How he drools warmly round his shallow bite on the back of her neck. If she was not so delirious herself.

He has one last thing to show her.

As if he was not magnificent, glorious enough for her to worship forever, in his final throws his flesh begins to change and light up.

His finale is _spectacular_. His limbs oscillate yellow to green to blue to white. Until at last, they are a sunfire bright the color of her tail.

He remain this way for several shining, soaring beats of her heart.

When her claiming is finally over, he withdraws carefully his long, sharp teeth from her shallow mark and laves her neck.

They drift down together into the bed of anemone. Clutching exhausted onto one other. Her body feels stretched and used. _Wonderful_. Shinging with the power she soaks from her mate. When they have nestled, his coils melt from her body. They spread lax and sated around their lair. All accept for the one still damming her frontslit. Holding in his seed inside her womb. His big chest rises and falls with fatigue. His fingertips strum love-whispers along her skin and scales.

She strokes him back. Cradles his jaw in her hand and kisses him.

Softly, his knuckles brush her cheek.

 _Have I satisfied your curiosities, my Rose,_ even his voice in her mind sounds winded. Slaked.

 _“No,”_ she yawns, showing her own little rows of sharp teeth as she lets out a gentle torrent of bubbles. She snuggles deeper into the anemone and into his arms. _“But we have lots of time, you said. A whole moon cycle. Probably, that will be long enough…”_

She has never heard him laugh outside her mind before. A hissing, menacing grumble which shakes their nest.

She hopes when her sons laugh, it is the same alien sound.

 _Precocious little eeling,_ he chides her lovingly. His tentacle inside her softens by degrees as her eyes fall shut. _Go to sleep…_

Many moons pass.

It becomes very difficult for Rose to swim the last thousand leagues to Fish Cove. Her belly is heavy. The sons inside her jostle and squabble for room inside her womb.

 _There are three,_ her mate seems very sure.

Rose is disappointed. For as stretched as she is, for as many times as her lover bred her, she hoped for more.

When she tells this to Armitage, he chuckles. _Greedy little mermaid._

She chuffs, sending up shoals of bubbles through her gills.

Their pod of two is too small. She longs for an ocean full of her children. For Armitage to reconcile with his remaining brothers. So that her many, many sons may safely swim. That they may grow and grow and _grow_ until they are as magnificent as their Alpha.

_Even more so._

Such are the dreams of a mother. She tells them to Armitage and to the landmen inside her lure box as they dance. She tells the fishes and slow-wending turtles of the reef and she tells Great Sun. She tells the moon in her fullness. When her light is pearls shining rippling through the glass waters.

Rose wants Sister to see her sons.

They make the long swim slowly. It has been almost three full years since Rose has breached The Cold. She is bigger. But her bright body is only a _dot_ in the dark, cold vastness of the ocean. A single red point amongst leagues and leagues of undulating deep. She swims near the surface where there is a little light, as her kind does.

Her mate swims below her. Churring the endless, still waters with his tentacles. Keeping a sharp, careful watch on his mate.

But nothing challenges him in the deep.

When she is too tired to finish their journey, when her sons bickering in her belly take their sweet toll, he carries her the last thousand leagues.

It thrills her. She had forgotten how quickly he swims when he is not humoring her turtle pace.

They reach Fish Cove at the end of the season. Before the pods of her people in mass yet apart make the swim back to the birthing cradles. To make love and to calve. The girls almost old enough to mate will practice their mothering on the tender infants. Rose wonders what her sons will look like. If they take any of the calves born this season when they older as their mates.

 _Oh no,_ her lover tells her. His voice smiling tenderly in her mind. Her hair which is now longer than her body trails them. It is full of shining shells and coral barrettes and landman’s gold. The mark of a mated mermaid. Even if she were not heavy with his children, even if he did not bear her like a landman’s bride over the threshold of Fish Cove, her kind would know she belonged to an Alpha.

 _The_ Alpha…

 _Our sons will not take mates for many, many years,_ he explains to her. As they peer together from the distant, duller reefs at the activity in Fish Cove. Rose is anxious, she has not seen her people in many moon cycles. Her lover is their natural enemy, and she is stretched full with his calves.

What if they do not accept her?

What if they blame her for the attack of her pod?

What if Sister has forgotten their love?

 _That is not the way of your kind,_ Armitage assures her with the gentlest touch of his tentacles to her cheek. Her side. Stroking her. He is anxious too, she can perceive it because she has loved him for so many days and moons.

His mother, she learns the story in bits and half-shells over time, was a mermaid. _Beautiful_ , like Rose. She bore too many sons for his father too quickly. He was as cruel as the great white sharks. Her body eventually withered. When it did, the father cast her aside. He stole another mermaid, and then another, and another.

Mother drifted. Alone in the terrible Cold.

She was found by a pod of her kind.

It was known throughout the ocean what had become of her. Her Alpha father tried to rescue her with the men from her pod but they were slain. When her people found her withered, they took her in. They sheltered her, as a mother shelters a calf she bears and knows will not live.

She died among her kind.

They would not let her sons near.

Armitage remembers her rare laughter. Her long golden white hair and her beautiful silver tail. He shows Rose pictures of Mother in her mind.

 _You will always be their daughter,_ he tells her of her people. His voice is full of grief.

 _“What about your Alpha?”_ she asks on the first moon during which they shelter together on the outer rim of Fish Cove. She is not yet brave enough to go amongst her people. She is afraid of how her heart will feel when Sister does not know her face.

Her mate is different this moon. Tense and distance. Like the dark, star-pricked sky when moon hides herself in secret sleep and does not give her light.

His sad smile is all razor teeth and no warmth. _When we grew strong enough, my brothers and I mobbed him. It is the only time we were a clan. Afterwards, we scattered. If we met again, it was in enmity. I have not seen one of my own in many, many moons. Many…_

Rose lays her lover’s hand on her belly. Where her sons, having found their peace with limbs wrapped around each other, curled together in her womb, lie still and sleep. If she closes her eyes, she can hear their hearts beat.

 _“You will soon,”_ she whispers.

He makes love to her. _Gently._ So gently. Behind a lush veil of reed and beneath his protection.

As Rose drifts to sleep in his embrace, she knows what she must do.

The next morning, when Great Sun’s light sets upon them like the goodness of a tender father, she leads her lover by the hand into Fish Cove.

Her people scatter at first. Chatter and squeal at him. The largest males form cliques and bark. But her mate is proud and unbothered.

He eclipses them all with his size.

 _“I am looking for my sister,”_ Rose ignores their pitying looks at her body decorated with his gentle love marks and at her belly stretched full of his calves. The women whisper and cower close to one another, but Rose does not regard their fear.

The cove is brilliant. Beautiful. Massive shoals of bright, multicolored fish swirl and swell. Eels and rays, serpents and turtles, jellystars and octopi all swim. The reef _dazzles_ like a crown of landman’s jewels with its colors.

Her people part for her and her lover as, with loud clicks and shrills, she explains, _“My pod was attacked by the orcas. Our Alpha was killed. It happened in deep waters. My sister-“_

_“Rose.”_

A girl emerges. She is… _beautiful._ Her long, long hair is dark like Rose’s. Her eyes have the same beautiful tilt and she has the same full mouth. It is the mouth of Rose’s stunning mother. Her tail is the silvery blue of Mama’s, too. She is smiling. Though her eyes shine bright and blurred like stars.

She holds a little calf in her arms.

 _“I lost my sister in The Cold the day the orcas attacked,”_ she swims closer. Closer. A fierce-looking Alpha behind her snarls, _“Paige-“_ but she does not heed him. She does not pay much attention to Armitage, either, who looms behind Rose like an undulating black sun.

Her eyes are only for Rose.

 _“I wanted to search for her but what was left of our pod would not let me. They told me the orcas took her-“_ when she is close enough, she reaches out and touches Rose’s cheek.

Rose touches hers back.

The calf coos in Paige’s arms.

Paige’s touch trails slowly down Rose’s body. Over the gentle marks made by her lover’s tendrils, wondering softly at the great stretch of her womb and then lingering on her swollen navel. Where the smattering of Rose’s red scales begin.

Paige whispers, smiling, _“She had a sunfire tail.”_

 _“I did not die,”_ Rose’s clicks tremor. She cradles her sister’s cheek in her hand. _“My lover saved me. I am Rose. I am your sister-”_

They gather together in a deep embrace. Holding their calves between them. Rose feels her niece nuzzle and huff sweetly into her gills.

Inside her, her sons dance at the voice of their aunt.

Paige nestles her calf into Rose’s arms. The child’s weight is light and tender. Paige tells her, _“Her name is Rose”_ before her silvery tail stirs and she presses upwards. Beyond Rose’s shoulder.

To where Armitage looms.

 _“Thank you. For saving my sister,”_ Paige takes his face in her hands. It is a love-gesture among their people, to lay foreheads together. Paige lays her very small one against Armitage. _“Thank you for bringing her to me. My brother-“_

 _You are welcome,_ Rose and the others hear his answer in their minds.

Rose holds her niece to her heart and smiles up at their embrace, and beyond them. Up at the ceiling of the ocean. At the golden shine of Great Sun.

A fic by PastelWonder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For my sisters.

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